The Toronto School of Communication Theory: Interpretations, Extensions, Applications (review)

‘If life were only like this,’ Woody Alan sighs in Annie Hall when Marshal McLuhan comes to his aid to prove that a Columbia University instructor, who pontificates behind him in a movie line about McLuhan’s work, knows nothing about it. I was reminded of that scene when facing, in the present volume, such questions as: living in this Internet age we cannot help but wondering, what would Innis have to say were he to live today?

Watson and Blondheim bring together essays on the contributions of University of Toronto economist Harold Innis and literary scholar Marshal McLuhan to the study of the social effects of media technologies – attempts at ‘domesticating Innis’ and ‘articulating McLuhan.’ My general feeling throughout has been that, had the two Toronto professors made an appearance at the conference on which this volume is based, as in Annie Hall, they would have probably advised the participants to avoid such an attempt. For Innis’s meticulous tracing of the relations between tangible means of communication and the development of civilizations, empires, and nations, and McLuhan’s ideas on the effects of print and electronic media on human cognition and culture cannot be easily applied to today’s new media without replicating Innis’s expansive level of historical analysis or McLuhan’s creativity and without serious recognition of the Canadian legacy informing both men’s work.

This legacy comes to bear in the articles by Menahem Blondheim, who traces Innis’s interest in communication to his early studies of Canadian staples such as the fur industry and the cod fisheries, and Ruth Katz and Elihu Katz, who show the effect of McLuhan’s agrarian romanticism on his preaching of the virtues of community. Once the volume turns to ‘applications,’ however, we find ourselves in the familiar realm of academic papers in which ideas rooted in profound historicism are turned into theoretical abstractions of greater or lesser value. I could not agree more with Paul Frosh, in his contribution to this volume, when he claims that the treatment of Innis’s work as a ‘hinterland’ is a missed opportunity to the reinvigoration of communication theory. The same can be said about the turning of McLuhan’s work, largely by his own making, into a set of overused slogans and metaphors. At the same time, this volume makes a contribution in pointing at the intellectual benefits we may gain from revisiting the two Toronto thinkers in our efforts to understand the new media environment, if we do so critically and ingeniously.

A case in point is Rita Watson’s article, which uses McLuhan’s directive to look at the impact of changes in media of communication on individual cognition and social life. She claims, however, that McLuhan’s arguments about the hierarchical bias of literate societies, which he expected to be restored by electronic media into the mode of traditional oral cultures, have been based on unexamined assumptions about the process of communication. Replacing these assumptions by a cognitive pragmatic model that problematizes the communication process, she shows that the consequences of a written medium are not absolute, and that the Internet, and computer technology in general, may thus not be seen – as they often are – as replacing the written word but rather as supplanting it. As she puts it, ‘You can’t surf the Internet if you can’t read the commands and other information on the screen.’

In other words, many questions asked today about the consequences of new media can be answered by following the Toronto school’s directives as long as its incumbents’ ideas, which have often been expressed in ‘fixed, ungeneralizable, code-specific terms,’ are critically examined and innovatively updated.